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starr-fall-knight-rise · 2 years ago

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Thank You and Goodbye

Hello everyone, I suppose you have all noted that the Empyrean iris stories have finally ended. I sincerely hope that all of you enjoyed what I had to offer and that I helped to bring some enjoyment to your life. In return I thank you all for everything you have done for me, and thank you most for the people who interacted with the story with questions comments and likes. Some of you have private messaged me, and said the nicest things that have helped me to keep going through the years. I cannot say how much I appreciate you.

A few things before I leave, I am leaving the Empyrean Iris universe on this blog for anyone who wishes to read, start reading or keep reading. You are free to play with the Empyrean Iris universe all you wish, as well as with its characters and locations. As long as credit is left where credit is due.

I will not be writing for this series again, though I may post some art if the thought takes me. I will still have access to this blog to answer questions and interact, so PM me here if you want, I will most likely be available.

The past few years have made me a much better writer.The change in my skill from beginning to end is incredible, but one of my greatest regrets is I never got to show you all what I could really do. These short form stories, written early in the morning before school sometimes lacked the quality I know that I can produce, maybe not grammatically, but at the very least you all never got to see my true writing abilities at their full potential: writing abilities I gained thanks to this series and thanks to you.

So with that in mind I have made a decision. I want you all to see the fruits of my labor, and what this series has done to its author (if you care to look, I wont force anyone :). But down below I will post chapter 1 of two independent side projects I have worked on during the time of this series. The first is a book I worked on sometime during the middle of the series, and that I finished more than a year ago which I plan on posting online to wattpad and A03 in the coming months, the second is the first chapter from my most recent project and which I hope to traditionally publish some day. I hope that at least one or two of you might read them and see the change in me that has resulted from this series

Chapter 1

Children of the Affliction

The Outbreak moved up the street in a wave of fetid flesh, their feet shuffling in an uncoordinated, stilted shamble as they dragged their diseased bodies through the ankle-deep filth of Veerus city.

As they walked, they moaned softly, their rotting vocal cords shivering with every breath they took.

The outbreak was not a quiet thing, and Eli was thankful for that as he pressed his back against the desiccated crumbling wall of the rotting city, as desiccated as its occupants.

He crouched low, but didn’t allow his hands to touch the ground and the filth that rested there. He closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath before peering out from the crack in the wall.

And so they continued on their shuffling, staggering way, their red decomposing flesh peeling back from rotting bone. A tidal wave of rancid air fogged up the lenses of his glasses with a stench so vile he had to swallow to keep from gagging. It was the kind of smell that burrowed its way into your nose like hungry maggots,leaving a sour penetrating taste behind on your tongue.

Eli wiped his glasses silently with a hand, and immediately regretted his ability to see as he watched a pale worm wriggle its way from the rotting folds of what had one been a nose, only to twist wetly before turning back to slither between ragged, purulent lips..

Eli turned away from the hole pressing his back against the wall and covering his nose and mouth with a hand. He forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply, an action which he immediately regretted as the filth rose up to seep into his nose and mouth.

Their groaning grew distant, and a small voice hummed in his ear.

“I thought you said you weren’t afraid of the Outbreak.”

His mouth was watering, a sure sign he was about to throw up. He let the saliva drip from his mouth and onto the ground, where it couldn’t cause him to vomit.

“Just because I’m not afraid of them doesn’t mean I want to give one a hug.”

“And all of this isn’t fear?.”

“This isn’t fear, this is nausea. Those things are disgusting. Why anyone would willingly serve Affliction is beyond me.” He looked down to where a large baleful eye peered out from under the flap of his satchel.

The Eye blinked wetly once and then twice before “The same could be said about people who willingly visit affliction.”

Eli sighed, “You of all people should know that our visit here is hardly willing.”

The eye rolled at him, “Still going on about your father are you.”

Eli’s shoulder’s stiffened slightly jaw tightening even as his fingers went white around the strap of his bag, “This isn’t just about that and you know it.”

“Your Hope,” the eye said, his voice a high pitched reedy quaver through the fog “Your little obsession always seems to bring us to the most loathsome cesspits: hiding under rocks or in the bowls of trees.”

Eli adjusted his glasses, “This entire world is a Cesspit, Wink. and it isn’t hope it’s research. Hope is blind without action, research might just be able to help me before ....” Eli trailed off then not entirely willing to voice the concerns that had become so pressing in the proceeding months. Instead, adjusted the shoulder strap of his satchel and stepped down from the crumbling building and onto the street below. He tried not to think about how his feet squished through the filth or how his weight seemed to depress against the soil, as if he was walking across great slabs of meat.

A pallid mist rose up around them, and he was thankful for the protective shroud he wore over his face. It didn’t keep out the smell, but he was at least relatively sure it would keep the Affliction at bay,

He stepped over a small creek of cloudy water, and tried not to think about the strange spongy chunks that bobbed just under the surface.

Wetness squished under his feet as he walked, and he stopped, reaching into his bag for a pen and notebook.

Wink moved to the side as he passed his hand in and then out, coming back with a faded leather-bound journal -- once his father’s journal now his, bound with something that might possibly have been human skin, though he did his absolute best not to think about that, and flipped open to an inner page, past pages and pages of spidery writing and jagged sketches until he found a fresh page. He allowed his hand to rest momentarily on the familiar course paper, taking comfort from the journal: an item that represented the only piece of his family he had left: his father’s research.

Wink stretched up from inside the bag, his long, gelatinous body elongating and stretching like a string of black slime , “What are you writing?”

“Just a reminder to throw away these clothes when we get back.”

“Afraid of getting sick are we?”

Eli tapped his chin and passed the notebook back into his bag, “out of all the Dreads, Affliction is, admittedly, one of my least favorite.”

“That implies you have a favorite?”

“I think that is generally the whole point, don’t you think? Why else would anyone choose to Serve the Dreads? You have to pick a favorite .”

Wink settled back into the bag, filling it’s contours like some sort of inky black puddle, “I feel like there is a distinct difference between having a favorite and having a, I dislike this thing the least.”

“I thought semantics was my thing.

Wink wiggled a little bit inside the bag, “Just getting back at you for all those times I had to listen to one of your pretentious lectures on the nature of fear.”

Eli adjusted his bag one more time, “That is assuming you even listen to me, which we both know you don’t.”

“No, no I don’t.”

The two of them lapsed into morose silence as the outskirts of the city passed away, and the twisted trees of the nearby swampland faded into the backdrop of fog. Up ahead, looming in the half illuminated mist, he could see the outline of Veerus city, less like a city and more like a cancerous growth on the face of the world seeping corruption and disease into the brackish feted bog that surrounded it.

He could see it now, canals of pollution leaking out from inside the city by way of giant corrugated pipes, which dumped cloudy water into the bog. The smell was indescribable, like a thousand rotting corpses. It came in gusts and waves steady one moment and then a sudden wall the next.

His mouth began to water again, and he stopped in the street to bend over and gag.

He wouldn’t allow himself to throw up, simply wanting the comfort and relief of expressing his disgust with this place. His hands tightened around the straps of his bag, the leather of the black gloves he wore creaking slightly as he moved up towards the looming shadow.

Overhead a black bird croaked, and Eli traced its stilted path through the sky, watching as a feather drifted down from above.

He was surprised the creature had enough feathers to fly.

Approaching the gates of Veerus his eyes fell on a pack of mangy dogs --with rotting skin and eyes so encrusted with yellow discharge he wondered how they could even see. They were huddled by the roadside, surrounding something that lay unmoving on the ground before them, tearing at it with their rotten teeth.

It looked like it had once been a cat.

Or maybe a rat.

He heard the rats in Veerus were almost as big as cats, but either way it didn’t matter. The thing was so diseased it had probably expired right there in the street so unrecognizable it didn’t matter what it HAD been once upon a time.

He made sure to keep to the other side of the street, eying the mangy mongrels as they chewed on their meal, not relishing the idea of what a bite from one of those infected things might do to him.

As he came upon the gate, he found himself held up at the back of a long line of people all crowding around the entrance, in a long line of hunched shoulders and ragged clothing. Looking at the mass of flesh before him, he found himself purposely distancing himself from the filth of bodies.

By the looks of them, he could see that most were peasants from the outlying marshland. They had that look about them, with scaly red skin, and bare feet with yellowed nails overgrown such that they were twisting back upon themselves. He grimaced as he imagined how it must feel to walk these streets, the rot squishing up between their toes. Their hair was lank like swampy weed and hung about their shoulders like wet moss while their skin hung loose and baggy around their faces.

Even despite all that, none of them were repulsive enough to be mistaken for one of the outbreak, or even one of the city dwellers, who were characteristically marred by leperous pockmarks and spongy patches of skin.

Granted, the swamp peasants lived on the land the affliction held dominion over, and many of them served the being in some way or another, but none of them were directly subject to it, so they had a little more safety than did their city dwelling brethren

Unfortunately for them, that meant they were still subject to disease as a natural course of things, as evidenced by their jaundiced skin. Just ahead of him, he saw an elderly woman hunched over a bundle of rags. peering out from those rags was a face, a feverish red face swollen and puffy with dark blue bags encircling the eyes.

He doubted the child had long to live.

Anyone who managed to grow up in a place like this and survive until adulthood was a miracle on their own.

The gate approached now, and just as the gate guards came within sight, the man before him collapsed suddenly convulsing in the filth of the street before going still. Barely anyone stopped to look. Eli barely flinched, watching as a group of leprous individuals hurried from an opening in the gate hauling a hand cart behind them.

The body was lifted by liver spotted hands and tossed into the back of the cart before being dragged away, to be tossed into one of the plague pits, the contents of which drained from those massive pipes and out of the city.

As he waited for his turn at the gate, Eli reached into the bag and pulled out his notebook and pen scratching a quick sketch of the scene before him

The men standing at the main gate were less diseased than the others: the only suggestion of their sickness being the pallid nature of their skin, and the glossy sheen of clammy sweat that acted as a constant veneer over their bodies.

He couldn’t tell if they were bald on purpose, or if the sickness had taken their hair.

“State your business.” One of them said, and Eli followed the man’s eyes as they ran up and down his body. Eli shrugged off the crawling sensation that ran a course over his spine as the man’s eyes paused to linger on the unblemished skin of his face….. Almost hungrily.

“State your business,” The second man repeated, voice raising with impatience.

Eli clenched one hand around the strap of his satchel, “I am here in the capacity of my work, as an information broker.”

One of the men snorted and hawked a thick filmy wad of phlegm onto the ground, “And what information do you have to broker?”

Eli looked the man in the face, the corners of his mouth turned slightly down, “What kind of information are you looking for. I have information on the safest trade routes, weather predictions, medicinal recipes-“

He was cut off.

“Let us see your identification.”

Eli nodded, dropping a hand into his bag to retrieve the little booklet of papers which he then passed over to the first man who looked it over with the same suspicious gaze..

In the end, it was his eyes that gave him away, running across the page too quickly and in such a strange pattern that he couldn’t have been reading. So either, he was lazy, or he couldn't read.

The man waved a dismissive hand, “Let him through.”

Eli was quickly sent on his way as the first man moved quickly onto his next subject.

As soon as they were out of hearing range a grumble rose up from the depths of his bag “He lies.”

Eli resisted the urge to brush a hand through his hair, “ It wasn’t totally a lie, besides What would you rather I had done? Tell them why we are really here?”

Wink stared at him from the shadow of the pouch contemplating his words before, “You are hardly likely to find your father here, and we both know it.”

Eli set his jaw forcing himself not to take Wink’s comments personally, “I know, but this isn’t about that, this is about…. Me.”

Wink hummed, “About that, what makes you think you are worth saving anyway. I thought you were erudite enough to know a lost cause when you see one”

Eli snorted “Big words from a wad of goo I might have just scraped from the bottom of my boot….. do you even know what it means?”

“I know plenty of large words, because unfortunately the only reading material I have in here during our long journeys just so happens to be your creepy journal and Cripman’s Thesaurus fifth edition. The least you could do is drop in some decent reading material every now and again.”

Eli huffed, “Yeah, perhaps, perhaps something with lots of pictures and very small words.”

“You cheeky bastard.”

“That’s me.” He looked up at the pale sky above and sighed. Besides, the wink was only half right. This wasn’t about stopping fear anymore; This was about saving his life. Eli only had so many days left, and those days were numbered.

He turned up another side street, following the map he had memorized earlier towards the center of the city. As he kept going, evidence of rot and sickness became more evident. More and more of those hand pulled carts trundled down the streets hardly even bothering to cover their gruesome cargo, all a mass of limbs and flesh melted together until it seemed to create one massive creature rather than just a pile of human bodies.

A metaphor, Simile or perhaps a close facsimile to the physical avatar of Affliction itself.

His mind was brought back to a page in his father’s Journal, where in was written an excerpt from one of the many books he had read, before leaving the journal to Eli. , “The Dreads and their incarnations” He could almost see the page upon which its description had been written, penned neatly in his father’s steady hand.

The creature lies within a pit in the ground-- a strange place for a god, though it is somehow fitting. The pit is filled a tenth of the way with brackish feted water, and flies churn in great wheeling circles overhead. When the creature moves it shifts with a great squelching sound that rips and rends like diseased flesh being peeled from bone. The pit itself is wide, almost unfathomably so, stretching out for what must be miles, and inside rests Affliction, a god of sickness, disease, and plague.

To look upon it is to understand unfathomable corruption and disgust as its great amorphous blob of skin seems to churn and undulate below. Its outside are bruised in the many colors of a rainbow, sour and perverted into this strange and unholy facsimile. It cannot be fathomed from where it starts and where it ends, and the limbs that wave above its head could be hands or feet or tentacles.

Not many but the Outbreak have seen the creature’s true form, for the power it holds, means that, to look on its body is to embrace the sickness, be permitted by it to become one with it.

To rot right down to the marrow of one’s bones.

Eli had some pity for the writer, for if he had seen what he had described, it was likely he was either one…. Dead, or two, a shambling corpse labeled as one of the Outbreak

He couldn’t say he felt entirely sorry for the man, as his first hand account saved Eli the curiosity of having to look at himself….. and the horrible boils that likely would have resulted. Overhead the sky had turned orange as the sun disseminated through the fog of corruption which shrouded the city.

It was a horrible place, and if it wasn’t for the Outbreak, the people would likely have fled long ago. but the Affliction had claimed them, and it wasn’t likely to let them leave any time soon.

Eli was close now, maybe a few blocks away from the library, and overhead, a rolling bank of clouds was passing its first shadow over the city.

Looking at the library, he could only hope that it would be cleaner on the inside than it was on the outside.

It would be best for him to keep his head low lest he attract the attention of one of the Outbreak. He didn’t want to become like these poor trapped souls, subject to their dark god.

It was never a good idea to catch the eye of one of the dreads.

Things tended to go generally very poor once that happened.

For everyone involved.

He was only delayed once on his way to the library, cutting behind a low stone archway as a contingent of the outbreak moved up the street, shambling and moaning like the deadmen that they were. He couldn’t tell what they were doing, but had suspicions that they were out hunting…. Looking for someone like him perhaps to bring into their fold, or to infect , their dark offering of fear to their hungry waiting god.

They passed up the street, and he slipped out from his hiding spot, hurrying forward to the one building in this place that seemed somewhat clean.

He said somewhat but there was still something about the building that didn’t sit right with him.

At one point, it had probably been constructed out of large blocks of white marble, though the city had stained the pure stone with yellow over the years, like

He paused just outside the door and took a long deep breath, looking up at the words that hung before him.

The Parvus School of Learning.

And then he reached out with two gloved hands and pushed the doors inwards.

Chapter 1

Oculus

He scurries through the streets like a rat, his feet trailing whispers behind him as he goes, and even from here I can see the drops of salty, sweat condensation clinging to his skin like a dancer’s paste on jewels.

I know this man, though he doesn’t know me.

But even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to.

A curtain of fog rises in a slow undulating wave from the Swampdark [may change this name] below, like the ghosts of the damned leading a procession towards the stars. When the fog touches me, I can almost feel the lifeless caress of those ghosts, the souls of all those the Swampdark has claimed.

The man turns a corner and I follow him, were it not for the midnight mirth echoing down from the upper city’s pleasure tier, he might have been able to hear the warning hiss of my mechanical joints. Luckily for me, the city humms, and my body hums with it, and in that hum I disappear.

Music drifts languidly down from above pulsing with a slow, mindless beat.

The man walks past a line of rickety storefronts, their windows and doors barred, and the message is clear: this city quarter bears no welcome for strangers. As he walks, his profile is painted by swatches of glowing blue neon, and now I can see the bottle in his hand more clearly. Neon light scatters through the container’s glass, and the light it refracts follows him down the street as a pale spector, his only companion in the night.

I slip closer, stealing strides of distance between us, a luxury he doesn’t even know he has.

I know this man.

I know him the way I know the thousands of men just like him, He’s got an iron lung, and it clings to the side of his bare torso like a bulging Nightleach, it's skeletal appendages burrowing into his body where it keeps anchored, The iron lung’s bellows spasm and pulse, struggling against the slow buildup of corrosion and rust, fighting to filter stagnant air into something the blood can use.

It looks painful, the eternal weight of the iron lung acting as his ball and chain that adds a perpetual twist to the man’s spine. Dying early might have been preferable to dragging around a botched suborgan.

I know this man.

He drinks hoping to abandon his pain in a bottle, he chews the bitter fungi to hang up his soul for the night, but when the ecstasy leaves him, abandoned like a one night lover he seeks to give his anger away: A gift no one asks for.

And who to give it to, but his starving, skeletal wife, and their seven, ghostly children.

Why would it matter to him? They'll all be corpses soon anyway, who will care if he speeds up the process, gives himself some relief.

I know this man.

And I am here to return his gifts.

The man pulls to a stop, lifting a desiccated hand to his pale, cracked lips. He coughs, and an unnatural sound is birthed from between his rotting teeth: wet and filmy, with saliva blackened by decay and rust.

He turns another corner, passing silently into the lurking darkness. A path waits there, beckoning us downward until the city is lost above us behind miles of desperate metal and concrete.

We step off the path, enfolded at once within an oppressive forest of towering iron

stilts collectively called the hands of salvation: baseless rhetoric streaming like piss from the mouths of upper tier clergy. I doubted a single one of those godless men had ever even laid eyes on a support pillar, less like a saintly hand lifting its inhabitants towards the sky, but more like a diseased arm, holding a plate cruelly above child’s grasping fingers

I am behind him now, no more than a few precious feet of feted atmosphere occupies the space between us

If he turned now, he could reach up and pluck away my eyes.

Overhead, the support beams creak and chitter, as if conversing among themselves.

The swamp dark is never silent.

The man’s steps are slow, plodding out the beat of his own funeral dirge against the hard-packed pathway.

Those unfortunate creatures that dwell here in the Swampdark are never without sound or even light, rocked to sleep by the tittering lullabies of rusted metal, and bathed in the malicious green glow of the trinity fields.

Wobbly, stilt legged hovels huddle together in lopsided clusters over the uneven ground of the Swampdark,desperate to avoid coming within close proximity of one of the pillars.

Despite living in truth’s overwhelming shadow, the people of the swamp dark still refuse to look her in the eye.

We are halfway to the first rickety settlement, and I don’t know what it is he senses first. The man doesn’t have many natural senses at his disposal as, One by one, a lifetime of hardships has robbed his bodily coffers clean of taste, smell, and touch. But still, I watch the chill as it licks down his spine, alerting him to my presence and causing him to turn.

Robbed of his taste and smell, life left one parting insult on its way out the door, and the man is shorter than me by almost a foot, but despite all that he is lacking, he still has the good sense to be terrified.

He backs away jaundiced eyes as wide and pale as the cryptcap mushrooms beneath his feet.

I know this man.

And now, he knows me too.

Knows me by my mechanical augments, my wire implants, my external regulator, and the large silver eye that blinks at him from the upper right side of my chest.

A word condolences from thought and forms as a word on his lips

Oculus

But he never gets the chance to speak it as my hand cuts off whatever piffling speech he was about to make, but

I know this man.

And I have heard his speech before muttered, screamed and pleased from a hundred quivering lips. They all offer the same excuses, passed between each other like an unwashed pair of socks.

And when the excuses fail to soften me, please and promises, empty and echoing like the bottles in their hands.

I lift the little man into the air kicking and struggling. He is heavier than he looks, iron lung dragged ever downward by the crushing weight of gravity, but my augmented limbs whirring to life with a hungry hiss.

Yun Johnov

I am here to equalize your sins.

I start with a headbut to the face, the cruel ridge of my mask biting into the delicate cartilage of his nose, which snaps without much protest. He howls, blood escaping eagerly from his nose to trace a getaway down his lips and chin.

With his feet back on the ground, I reel back and punch him hard in the gut, brutalizing his already corroded liver.

He doubles over retching.

I knee him, this time in his chin, and he reels backward, tripping over a huddle of mushrooms and staggering to one knee. His iron lung screeches in protest, but I’m not quite done just yet.

I step forward, casting the dim impression of my shadow over his quivering body. He casts his hands high, shielding me from his sight.

But I want him to look at me.

I kick his hands out of the way, feeling as one of his brittle bones crumbles beneath my kick.

His face is open and uncovered now, chin and mouth glazed in blood, thinning hair slick with sweat.

I pull back one more time.

He falls to the ground a moment later, bearing my signature, signed with the judicious application of my open palm. My mark will last for days, the broken nose for a few weeks, but the memory of my intervention will remain until the bellows of his miserable lung stops choking in air.

“An eye for an eye.” I say, making my pronouncement to no one in particular as I stand over his battered body.

We are close enough to the nearest cowering settlement for the occupants to have heard us, but they are unlikely to come to the man’s aid. Either he will negotiate his way back upright, or he will decay there in the mud, fertilizing the trinity fields with his juices, leaving only an iron lung as his headstone.

I bar thoughts of the man from my mind as I turn and trace my way up the pathway and into the lower city.

The lower city isn’t really part of the city proper, but a minefield of ghostly shanty towns, stacked in dangerously unbalanced heaps in the shadow of the upper city. The people here aren’t well off, but at least they are blessed to sit cupped in the palms of salvation, or at least that’s how some try to justify their miserable existence.

In reality, people in the lower city aren’t much better off than people in the Swampdark, in fact the only real difference between the two groups is a matter of a few IQ points and a false sense of superiority.

Despite the abundance of ramshackle dwellings, I don’t see many people here, and I don’t expect to. Generally, I am the first person most people see, and the last person most people want to see, and as a result, my very existence tends to thin a crowd.

I pass through the ghost shanties, as much as a ghost myself.

From there, I find my way up to the pleasure tier, its streets glazed with candy-bright colors spilling down from vibrant neon signs, and refracting through grimy panes of glass.

The music crawls its sinuous way down into the street and vibrates up through the souls of my feet, stopping to pulse, and dance to the beat of the blood in my ears.

Men and women writhe and dance before me, bathed together in the neon light. I can sense a few wary eyes turned my way, but the vast majority of people hardly notice me. The tang of trinity hangs heavy on the air, its presence announced by the thick, sweet smoke, and the bitter taste that makes itself manifest on the back of my tongue. A young woman staggers past me, the white underbelly of her eyes on full display, and her arms are flung out to either side as trinity guides her through fields of ecstasy for the night.

Curvaceous shadows dance low, and slow beyond a red-shrouded window.

“Over here, Oculus.”

Tangled between strands of real human hair, delicate fibrous cables lift themselves from my scalp tugging me towards the origin of the sound.

The owner of that voice, does not attempt to hide, quite the opposite in fact

She stands in a nearby doorway, allowing glowing neon the privilege of kissing her skin as she stands. A ruby red gown blooms from her body stretching in languid curves down her legs and towards the floor. A wave of long dark hair spills down the side of her face and onto her shoulder, which is bare, and open to the night air.

I am surprised to see she is mostly organic, none of her curves borrowed, leased or welded on.

She motions me over with a finger, “You look like someone who could use some company.” The same rote phrase trails from her lips, like it has from thousands of lips just like her since time immemorial.

I raise an eyebrow, and the fiber optic cables in my hair rise with it, “Is that so?

She smiles, and I am almost impressed to see she has all her teeth, either that or an excellent set of dentures, “I believe it is.” When she breathes, a gentle fog of steam obscures the clear plastic of her external regulator, her only non-implanted augmentation.

I tap my wrist, and her corresponding hand lights up. She looks down and then back to me, “That’ll get you an hour.” But even as she begins to speak, I have already waded my first few steps back into the flow of the crowd.

“Hey! Where are you going! You know, I don’t do third party locations.” she says shouting to be heard over the music.

I turn my head internally, dialing down the background noise so I can hear her more clearly, “Keep it.” I say allowing the crowd to flow around me on either side.

St stands, resting her hands on her full hips. Somehow, even her hands are beautiful: long and slender against the ruby hue of her dress, “I don’t accept charity, Oculus.”

“It’s not charity.” I say, calling back over my shoulder.

She tosses her hair, which whips itself into a proud mane around her shoulders,“Then what is it!”

“A thank you.”

That response seems to catch her off guard. She stands, a pillar of stillness in a sea of flashing lights, and stares at me through the ebbing tide of the crowd, “For what?”

I turn away from her, and when I finally give her my voice, it is a quiet offering falling from my lips like shredded paper fluttering down from the upper city, “For being the first person to talk to me like a human tonight.”

I make sure to be gone before she can answer, allowing myself to be swept away by a torrent of light and noise, bodies pressed around me filling my nose with the sulfurous odor of sweat, and the bitter tang of trinity.

Leaving the pleasure district, I shed neon and sweet smoke like water, the night air of the manufacturing district scrubbing my skin clean of revelry only to apply its own unique perfume.

Industry.

A distant line of massive, black smokestacks cuts a violent edge across the diffused, blue glow of the city skyline, huffing great clouds of rancid black smoke into the already hazy blue air. Lines of steel cables, electrical wires and bridges cut an impressionist pattern between the towering buildings.

The trinity factories are never quiet, run perpetually by ghostly night shift laborers fed with a steady stream of liquid stim. Some with company- subsidized ports directly into their bloodstreams for easier dosing. I’d seen it close up on several occasions, once as a boy when I was briefly employed on the refinery floor: employed until a steel hatch severed three of my fingers, and I was made redundant.

I flex my hand at the phantom memory of pain, before abandoning the memory on the streetside, though it would inevitably follow me home and find its way back into my head.

Until then, I would force peace upon myself.

The industry district occupies a long, single stretch of road that cuts like a scar through the central stacks of the city, always no more than a few miles from any possible origin point, offering no excuses for workers who found themselves running a few minutes late. Beyond this, only the trinity fields stretching for miles of back breaking labor beneath the city offer any consistent source of work.

I make my way past these buildings, hunching gloomily against the perpetually dark sky, and finally find my feet plodding along more familiar paths.

My place of work sits sandwiched somewhere off and to the side of both the industry district and the administration/government district ostracized from the bulk of the city by high concrete fences topped with a thin, blue electrical field. Additionally, the outer perimeter is surrounded on three sides by a murky perimeter of marble black water serving as a secondary deterrent to anyone already stupid eough to get to close to begin with.

I approach the front gate, a massive slab of silver metal with a barely visible hairline seam running a track down the middle.

At the center of the gate, the large, silver mockery of an eye blinks open, its external sensors connecting to the eye on my chest.

It blinks once issuing a series of robotic sounds followed by an inhuman mechanical voice.

Oculus Ailanthus 3

The gate cracks open, splitting the eye in half to invite me inside.

The courtyard and training fields lie silent and abandoned this time of day. My footsteps echo in protest to the silence as I lead my one man procession up to the grand double doors, which slide open for me without a sound. A thin beam of green/yellow light pours in a torrent from the open door, sweeping me up in a blinding spotlight as I step through the doors and into the grand atrium.

My eyes shed a small torrent of tears as they adjusted to the light, pouring down from our one greatest symbol of power and glory.

The tree.

Tall enough and wide enough, to take up the entire far wall of the large atrium, the plant stands proud within its environmentally controlled glass enclosure. A shroud of golden light filters gently through the emerald leaves and onto the ground where a curtain of lazy grass sways slowly in an artificial breeze. As far as I know, the tree is the largest of its kind, at least thirty feet tall, with a trunk as thick as a man’s thigh, and a tangle of branches forking out like the delicate veins and capillaries of a man’s heart. The leaves that sprout from its branches are smaller than my palm, and shaped like gently tapering spades.

As usually, the tree robs me of both my breath and attention, but I’m not one to complain.

“Oculus…”

Everything inside that class container is so clean, and gentle, even the lacy patterns of golden light cast onto the ground seem so much brighter than the grungy blue neon that paints the walls of the city.

“Ailanthus!”

Reality makes its unwanted appearance, barging in on the back of our front desk administrator’s nasally voice. I turn my eyes on the little man, no larger than five foot four, fighting with an aggressively retreating hairline, in a losing battle for his scalp. The son of some mid level administrator, he had been granted little enough power, and an even smaller amount of respect.

He glares at me expectantly, his small black uniform hanging in bags around his armpits and chest.

Usually, I might have had a little sport with the tiny man, but not today.

I walk up to the counter, and stand still, while the little man, can’t remember his name, unlocks the Observer from my chest, unplugging the bionic eye with a pop. He turns in his chair, plugging the camera into a waiting port, “Report?”

I rest the palms of my hands flat on his countertop, smudging its polished surface with the imprint of my fingers, “I have completed three sanctioned beatings, two retaliatory robberies, and returned three truancies. It must be noted that one retaliatory robbery resulted in compulsory amputation when no item of equal or greater value could be provided.”

Behind him, the observer unit blinked and chimed a long, low note.

The small man gave an aggressive stamp to a sheet of paper and handed it over.

“Bring this to-.”

“The records office, I know.” I held up the paper, eyes scanning lazily down the page as I made my leisurely way from the room, red ink glistening like a smear of blood on the white paper circular red letters reading.

Government of the Coladium: Department of the Seer Collective

Oculus 336 Ailanthus.

Certification of case completion.

I dropped my hand to the side, letting the piece of paper fall with it, turning only once to look back at the tree glowing like a beacon in the atrium behind me.

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